Explained : Varanasi’s Critics Prefer Decay To Development —The Government Should Ignore Them and Its Impact

The Congress Party has discovered, somewhat belatedly, a passion for Hindu heritage. Mallikarjun Kharge, its president, thundered this week that renovations at Varanasi’s Manikarnika Ghat—the most sacred cremation ground in Hinduism—constitute a “grave sin” against India’s civilisational inheritance.

Priyanka Gandhi, never one to miss an opportunity for moral outrage, accused the Modi government of “tearing through the historical fabric woven by figures like Ahilyabai Holkar.” One might be forgiven for detecting a whiff of opportunism rather than genuine piety.

The controversy concerns a modest Rs 17.56 crore ($2 million) renovation project at the burning ghat, initiated when Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid its foundation stone in July 2023.

The plan is prosaic: wider pathways for funeral processions, better cremation platforms, a wood plaza to replace chaotic timber storage, ramps for the elderly and disabled, and improved sanitation at a site where 150-400 bodies are cremated daily.

The district administration insists that artefacts being temporarily removed—including a disputed statue—will be reinstalled once construction concludes. Yet to hear the opposition tell it, one would think the government was paving over Shiva’s earring itself.

The bigger picture critics refuse to see

What the professional mourners of Congress and their fellow-travellers willfully ignore is that Kashi needs wholesale renovation. It always has. This is not some pristine Pompeii frozen in sacred amber. Varanasi is a living city that has been built, destroyed, rebuilt, encroached upon, and transformed countless times across three millennia.

The Kashi Vishwanath Temple itself—which Congress now invokes as an untouchable heritage benchmark—was demolished by Muhammad of Ghor in the twelfth century, rebuilt during Akbar’s reign, destroyed again by Aurangzeb in 1669, and reconstructed by Ahilyabai Holkar in 1780. The sacred, in Kashi, has always been contested and reconstructed.

What prevailed before the Modi government’s corridor projects was not some organic cultural harmony but centuries of haphazard encroachment. The temple complex was hemmed in on all sides by dense, illegal construction. Public spaces had been swallowed. The many small temples and fine old houses in the area had been “insensitively built over,” as one architectural review put it. Access to the main shrine was severely constricted—a dark, cramped, filthy passage that humiliated pilgrims rather than elevating them. The Ganga herself was invisible from the temple she was meant to purify.

The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, inaugurated in December 2021, changed this. Some 314 buildings were demolished and 1,400 shops relocated, with compensation, the government claims, at twice the market rate.

The result? Temple visits surged from a few thousand daily to 45,000 by 2023. Foreign tourist arrivals to Varanasi increased 120-fold in three years. Over 10 crore visitors passed through the corridor in its first 20 months.

Streets once clogged with pilgrims were widened; medieval lanes where two-wheelers, handcarts, and funeral processions competed for inches were cleared. The temple, invisible from the river for generations, now stands open to the sky, its golden spire glinting above a pristine colonnade of pink sandstone.

This is the context in which the Manikarnika renovation must be understood. Not as some sinister land-grab, but as a continuation of a necessary urban reclamation project.

The bad faith of the critics

The Congress attack is remarkable not merely for its timing—the party that governed for six decades never lifted a finger to improve conditions in Kashi—but for its utter absence of any alternative vision.

What, precisely, is Congress’s plan for the burning ghat where smoke from open pyres chokes mourners, where informal wood storage creates fire hazards, where debris and ash routinely enter the sacred Ganga, where narrow lanes force funeral processions to jostle with tourists?

The party offers no answer because it has none. Its leaders have made precisely zero proposals for how to handle the 150 daily cremations at Manikarnika in a manner that respects both tradition and basic sanitation. This is opposition for its own sake. The politics of perpetual complaint without the burden of governance.

But Congress is not alone in its cynicism. A section of the critics attacking these renovations are those whose livelihoods depend on the existing disorder. The traditional economy of death at Manikarnika is not some egalitarian fellowship of the devout. It is a rigidly stratified extraction system that has milked pilgrims at their most vulnerable.

This is not to say these communities deserve no consideration. They do, and any sensible reform must accommodate their livelihoods. But to pretend that opposition to renovation is purely about sacred heritage is to confuse the interests of a particular economic order with the interests of Hinduism itself.

Many of the structures now being removed were themselves encroachments. Houses built over small temples, shops occupying public thoroughfares, structures that accumulated not through devotion but through the slow accretion of commercial interest masquerading as tradition.

Scholars have documented how “shrines were constructed within houses, and folk mythologies were superimposed to raise the image under upward mobility.” In other words: people invented traditions to justify encroachments. When the corridor project began clearing land near the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, it uncovered over 40 forgotten temples that had been literally built over—absorbed into residential and commercial structures and lost for generations. Some heritage.

Why Congress’s conversion is unsurprising

That Congress has found common cause with this coalition of displaced economic interests, professional protesters, and hereditary gatekeepers should surprise no one. The party that ruled India for most of its independent history showed no interest in Kashi’s condition when it held power.

The Kashi Vishwanath corridor project was formulated eight years before it was finally executed, shelved by successive governments of the Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party, both allied with Congress’s broader political ecosystem. “This project was rejected by Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav,” observed one protester in 2018, noting the irony that it was being revived by a party “which has always projected itself as a defender of Hindu religion and culture.”

Congress’s objections follow a familiar pattern. The party opposed the corridor project when it was announced. It opposed the renovation of Jallianwala Bagh. It opposed changes to the Parliament complex. In each case, the charge is the same: that Modi wishes to “erase historical heritage” and “affix his own nameplate.”

The accusation says more about Congress’s own anxieties than about any actual pattern of vandalism. The Kashi Vishwanath Temple still stands. The corridor’s museums celebrate Ahilyabai Holkar and the city’s composite heritage. The artefacts being removed from Manikarnika are being catalogued by the culture department for reinstallation.

What the government is erasing is not heritage but disorder. And for a party that governed India from Independence without once attempting to improve conditions at the holiest sites of the majority faith, the sudden discovery of Hindu sentiment rings hollow.

The way forward

None of this means the government’s execution has been flawless. The sight of bulldozers at a cremation ground is jarring, and officials could do more to communicate timelines and reassure residents. The temporary removal of statues, however carefully managed, creates opportunities for viral outrage. Displacement, even when compensated, is painful.

But the direction of travel is correct. The Manikarnika renovation should proceed. More than that: the government should expand the scope of such corridor projects to other heritage cities. Ayodhya, Mathura, Ujjain, and beyond. India’s sacred geography has been allowed to decay for too long under governments that saw temple renovation as either politically inconvenient or simply irrelevant.

The critics will wail. Congress will accuse Modi of erasing heritage while offering no plan of its own. Local interests will protest change while profiting from stasis. Some genuinely believe that Kashi’s essence lies in its grime and chaos; that cleaning the ghats somehow diminishes their sanctity; that pilgrims seeking moksha should suffer through congestion as part of their spiritual preparation.

They are wrong. Kashi has survived invasions, demolitions, floods, and neglect. It will survive better pathways and cleaner cremation grounds. The pyres at Manikarnika have burned without interruption for millennia. A wider plaza and a wood depot will not extinguish them. What might extinguish Kashi’s flame is the inertia of those who confuse decay with authenticity, encroachment with tradition, and opposition with governance.

The fires of progress, like the fires of the ghat, consume only what is no longer needed. Let them burn.